Wednesday, July 23, 2014

short fiction: Bindelini's New Behavior Pattern

Bindelini couldn’t help remembering how he used to feel about his life.  He found the dusty dust jacket from his Vhs copy of Sex Organs, a very hip movie from the late 1990s.  The dust cover was underneath an improvised shelf, a space Bindelini never dusted, squashed flat, with a foot print, certainly his, in the dirt and cob web filaments.   He had his VCR and deep dish twelve inch television   on the shelf above, with a load of VHS tapes stacked, out of their dust covers, on the ‘unit.’ All appliances are a ‘unit.’   Not at all typical of the old Bindelini, the new one picked up the dirty dust cover from one his old favorite movies, Sex Organs, and threw it in his flimsy plastic trash receptacle.   The receptacle was a cheap imitation of the more famous Rubbermaid type of office shit can.  Bindelini got his at a dollar store.


He had grown slightly more decisive in the last twelve months, and clear as a reading on a digital micrometer, he had grown as a person.   No more hoarding.  No more retaining posessions that aren’t helping his case.  The movie made him remember Dahlia, with whom he had hoped to have at least a tolerable working relationship at Pressley Ridge Schools, where both losers worked as ‘residential advisors. ‘   They served as role models for people with special needs.  And a fucking fine role model Dahlia provided, trading sex for drugs or over-time and other little job perks.    That relationship was a sore spot in Bindelinis memory banks, and the movie reminded him of her.   One thing they had in common was that they both loved that really hip, cool movie about lively, entertaining career criminals.


To further support throwing out the old movie, his favorite podcast hostess had talked about one of her gay men friends, who was still stuck in the 1990s.  The 20teens are  taking a purposefully innocuous state of effete suspicions and loyalist mendacity.  The friend of the hostess still wanted to be a lovable tecky in a garage band, playing some Smash Mouth covers.  No one is doing cover tunes anymore.   No one still hoards stuffed animals.  Men don’t bother with male bonding stunts, because they are either in the click or out.  To Bindelini, this was like a message directly to his heart from the podcast hostess’ lips.   Divorce from the 1990s.


There was one thing that was still viable in 2014, and that would have to be ritual.  People always had them, and always needed them.  There remained, too, the need to forget.   In the 1960s, in film, it was taught to us all that people go to bars, friendly ones, with people in suits and fedoras, and in the bar they drink to forget the things that didn’t work out too cool for them.  That approach stopped working for people around the time the post offices started laying off postal workers, in the 1970s.  It became popular to refer angry people to a shrink.  

This brings us all to the disposition of an outdated movie on VHS, which is also outdated, even though you can watch all the movies you want on your VHS unit.  It’s the penalty phase of a situation, an ordinary, unimportant situation.  And it is spiritual, for elsewise, it would be acceptable to just toss the film in the trash.  Bindelini found his Crossman pump action BB pistol, set the film Sex Organs on his mantle, placed a phone book behind the video cassette, and took to firing pellets at it.  His first shot grazed the door to the film, the thing that gets lifted inside your VCR, so the cogs and magnetizers can have at the sanctity of human perception, against an ordinary perception of ordinary daily life.  Films make people wish they were different from themselves, and more similar to members of a super hip ensemble cast. Bindelini’s second shot cracked into the clear plastic in front of the tape inside, but the cast of the film was undoubtedly still alive, the way you can’t kill a bank robber by just shooting into his/her house, through a window.  The perp must be where the bullets are, just like a commoner has to be where the action is to get anywhere in this life.   Aiming more carefully, his third pellet hit the spool of VHS tape somewhere in the mid section, and was most unlikely to have done much harm to the super-hip.  It was then that he needed to think about what he was doing.  How many pellets must he shoot before a film such as Sex Organs dies?  Is ‘hip’ able to die, same as a person?  And will it’s death result in a future worth taking out of it’s dust jacket?  Of course not.  But still, we need rituals.  We need a source of hope.  Bravo, Bindellini, for doing exactly the right thing.

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